A Content Model Is Not a Design System

Do you recall the days gone by when having a successful site was sufficient? Nowadays, people are getting answers from Siri, Google seek fragments, and mobile applications, not only our websites. Forward-thinking companies have adopted an holistic content approach whose goal is to reach audiences across a variety of digital channels and platforms.

But how can a content management system ( CMS ) be set up to reach your current and future audience? I learned the hard way that creating a content model—a concept of information types, attributes, and relationships that let people and systems understand content—with my more comfortable design-system wondering would collapse my patient’s holistic information strategy. By developing content versions that are lexical and even join related content, you can avoid that result.

I just had the opportunity to lead a Fortune 500 company’s CMS execution. The customer was excited by the benefits of an holistic information plan, including material modify, multichannel marketing, and robot delivery—designing content to be comprehensible to bots, Google knowledge panels, snippets, and voice user interfaces.

For our information to be understood by many systems, the unit needed conceptual types, which are names given based on their meaning rather than their presentation. This is crucial for an multichannel content strategy. Our aim was to allow artists to create original content and use it where necessary. However, as the project progressed, I realized that the entire team had to be aware of a new design in order to support material reuse on the level that my customer needed.

Despite our best purposes, we kept drawing from what we were more common with: design techniques. Unlike web-focused information strategies, an holistic information approach doesn’t rely on WYSIWYG tools for design and structure. Our tendency to approach the content model using our well-known design-system thinking consistently stifled our attention from one of the main objectives of a content model: delivering content to audiences across multiple marketing channels.

Two fundamental tenets govern a successful content model

We needed to explain to our designers, developers, and stakeholders that we were doing something completely different from their previous web projects, where everyone assumed that content would fit into layouts as visual building blocks. Because it made the designs feel more recognizable, the previous approach was more intuitive, at first, at least initially. The team was able to understand how a content model differs from the design systems we were familiar with by discovering two principles:

Instead of layout, semantics must be used by content models.
Additionally, content that belongs together should be linked to content models.

Semantic content models

A semantic content model uses type and attribute names that reflect the content’s intended purpose and not its intended display. For example, in a nonsemantic model, teams might create types like teasers, media blocks, and cards. These types may simplify the presentation of content, but they do not aid in understanding the meaning of the content, which would have opened the door to the content presented in each marketing channel. In contrast, a semantic content model employs type names like product, service, and testimonial to allow for each delivery channel to interpret the content and use it as necessary.

A great place to start when creating a semantic content model is by reviewing the types and properties that Schema has defined. org, a community-driven resource for type definitions that are intelligible to platforms like Google search.

A semantic content model has several benefits:

A competitive advantage can also be gained by a semantic content model. by including schema-based structured data. org’s types and properties, a website can provide hints to help Google understand the content, display it in search snippets or knowledge panels, and use it to answer voice-interface user questions. Without ever visiting your website, potential visitors could easily find your content.
Beyond those practical advantages, you’ll also require an omnichannel content delivery model. Delivery channels must be able to understand the same content in order to use it across multiple marketing channels. For instance, if your content model provided a list of questions and answers, it could be easily displayed on a frequently asked questions ( FAQ ) page as well as be used by a bot to answer frequently asked questions.

For example, using a semantic content model for articles, events, people, and locations lets A List Apart provide cleanly structured data for search engines so that users can read the content on the website, in Google knowledge panels, and even with hypothetical voice interfaces in the future.

Content models that connect

Instead of slicing up related content across disparate content components, I’ve come to the realization that the best models are those that are semantic and also connect related content components ( such as a FAQ item’s question and answer pair ). Content that needs to be reused by multiple delivery channels can be connected to each other without having to assemble those pieces again in a good content model.

Consider creating an essay or article. An article’s meaning and usefulness depends upon its parts being kept together. Without the context of the entire article, would one of the headings or paragraphs have any meaning on their own? Our well-versed in designing systems frequently led us to want to develop content models that would break content into smaller pieces to fit the web-centric layout. This had a similar effect to an article that had its headline removed. Content that belonged together became challenging to manage and nearly impossible for multiple delivery channels to understand because we were cutting content into separate pieces based on layout.

To illustrate, let’s look at how connecting related content applies in a real-world scenario. A complex layout for a software product page that included multiple tabs and sections was presented by the client’s design team. Our instincts were to follow the content model’s. Shouldn’t we make adding multiple tabs in the future as simple and flexible as possible?

We felt like we needed a content type called “tab section” because our design-system instincts were so well-known, so that multiple tab sections could be added to a page. Each tab section would display a variety of content types. One tab might provide the software’s overview or its specifications. Another tab might provide a list of resources.

Our tendency to divide the content model into “tab section” pieces would have resulted in a cumbersome editing process, as well as unnecessarily complex content that couldn’t have been digested by additional delivery channels. How would a different system have been able to determine which “tab section” referred to a product’s specifications or resource list, for instance? Would that system have had to have used tab sections and content blocks to calculate this? This would have prevented the tabs from ever being rearranged, and it would have required adding logic to each other delivery channel to interpret the layout of the design system. Additionally, it would have been difficult to migrate to a new content model in response to the new page redesign if the customer had decided against displaying this content in a tab layout.

We had a breakthrough when we discovered that our customer had a specific purpose in mind for each tab: it would reveal specific information such as the software product’s overview, specifications, related resources, and pricing. Our desire to concentrate on the visually appealing and well-known had obscured the design’s purpose once implementation began. With a little digging, it didn’t take long to realize that the concept of tabs wasn’t relevant to the content model. What was important was the meaning of the information that they intended to display in the tabs.

In fact, the customer could have chosen to display this content elsewhere in a different manner, without tabs. In response to this realization, we decided to create content types for the software product based on the meaningful qualities the client wanted to display on the web. There were obvious semantic attributes like name and description as well as rich attributes like screenshots, software requirements, and feature lists. The software’s product information stayed together because it wasn’t sliced across separate components like “tab sections” that were derived from the content’s presentation. Any delivery channel—including future ones—could understand and present this content.

Conclusion

In this omnichannel marketing project, we discovered that the best way to maintain the content model’s semantic consistency was by ensuring that it was semantic ( with type and attribute names that reflected the content’s meaning ) and that it maintained content that belonged together ( as opposed to fragmenting it ). These two ideas made it easier for us to shape the content model based on the design. Remember: If you’re developing a content model to support an omnichannel content strategy, or even if you just want to make sure that Google and other interfaces understand your content, keep in mind:

A design system isn’t a content model. You should maintain the semantic value and contextual structure of the content strategy throughout the entire implementation process because team members might be tempted to combine them and to make your content model resemble your design system. Without the use of a magic decoder ring, every delivery channel will be able to consume the content.
If your team is having trouble making this transition, Schema can still offer some of the advantages. org–based structured data in your website. The benefit of search engine optimization is a compelling reason on its own, even if additional delivery channels aren’t on the horizon in the near future.
Remind the team that removing the content model from the design will allow them to update the designs more quickly because content migration costs won’t be prohibitive. They will be prepared for the upcoming big thing, and they will be able to create new designs without compromising compatibility between the design and the content.

By firmly defending these ideas, you’ll help your team treat content the way it deserves as the most important component of your user experience and the best way to engage with your audience.